Henry Steele Commager
Henry Steele Commager (born October 25, 1902 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , † March 2, 1998 ) was an American historian .
Life
Commager graduated from the University of Chicago with a doctorate in 1930. His teachers there included the expert in colonial history, Marcus W. Jernegan , and the specialist in US constitutional history, Andrew C. McLaughlin . From 1930 he taught at New York University , from 1936 at Columbia University and then until his retirement in 1992 at Amherst College .
In The American Mind , he describes the development of liberalism in the USA from the 1880s to the 1940s. Politically, he was also a liberal: he supported Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s , was an opponent of McCarthy in the 1950s, supported Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy , campaigned for the civil rights movement (he supported, among other things the African-American historian John Hope Franklin, speaking at the Southern Historical Association ) and was later a critic of the Vietnam War and of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan .
He wrote some history textbooks widely used in the United States with Samuel Eliot Morison and his colleague at Columbia University Allan Nevins . Further books were devoted to intellectual history of the 18th century (Age of Enlightenment ) in the USA (The Empire of Reason) and he wrote a biography of Theodore Parker .
He was the editor of the Documents of American History collection , first in 1938 and for the tenth edition in 1988. In 1952 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .
Fonts
- with Samuel Eliot Morison The Growth of the American Republic , Oxford University Press, 1930, 7th edition 1980, revised and abridged edition 1983 with William E. Leuchtenburg as A Concise History of the American Republic
- Documents of American History , 1934
- Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusader , 1936, online
- with Allan Nevins Readings in American History , 1939
- Majority Rule and Minority Rights , 1943
- The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880s , Yale University Press 1950
- Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent , 1954, online
- The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiography , 1965
- Freedom and Order: A Commentary on the American Political Scene , 1966
- The Defeat of America: War, Presidential Power, and the National Character , 1974
- Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment , 1976
- The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment , Doubleday 1977
- Commager on Tocqueville , University of Missouri Press, 1993
literature
- Neil Jumonville: Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present , The University of North Carolina Press, 1999
Web links
- Entry on Henry Steele Commager in the Database of Classical Scholars (English)
- Henry Steele Commager Project, Amherst College
Individual evidence
- ^ Members: Henry Steele Commager. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 23, 2019 .
personal data | |
---|---|
SURNAME | Commager, Henry Steele |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American historian |
DATE OF BIRTH | October 25, 1902 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania |
DATE OF DEATH | March 2, 1998 |